Motivational Quotes

Ideas

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

- Victor Hugo

Best Quotes about Ideas

Mere words are cheap and plenty enough, but ideas that rouse and set multitudes thinking come as gold for the mines.

Penny, A. Owen

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Disraeli, Benjamin

It's a pretty good idea to be of good cheer but not all the time. Just at the most unexpected times.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.

Clarke, Arthur C.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

Go out and buy yourself a five-cent pencil and a ten-cent notebook and begin to write down some million-dollar ideas for yourself.

Grinde, Bob

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

Pound, Ezra

10.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

Bacon, Francis

11.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

12.

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

Williamson, Marianne

13.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Hill, Napoleon

14.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Hugo, Victor

15.

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France

17.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

18.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

Marquis, Don

20.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

21.

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

22.

You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.

Robbins, Irvine

23.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

25.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

James, William

26.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Frost, Robert

27.

We are governed not by armies, but by ideas.

Caird, Mona

28.

Such as take lodgings in a head that's to be let unfurnished.

Butler, Samuel

29.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

30.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Bragg, Sir William

32.

We like to test things... no matter how good an idea sounds, test it first.

Block, Henry

33.

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

Bunche, Ralph

34.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

Rorty, Richard

35.

Ideas... they have the power

Hill, Napoleon

36.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

37.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

38.

The point, simply, is that we are doing more rediscovering these days than discovering coming anew upon truths that ignorant people refused to examine, over the centuries, because the wise people who held custody of the fundamental truths of nature were unpopular.

Williamson, John

39.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

Not the one who has many ideas, but the one who has a single conviction may become a great person.

Cotvos

41.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas, just as there are will-dressed fools.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

42.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.

Saunders, Richard

43.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

Decter, Midge

44.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

45.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Bachelard, Gaston

46.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

47.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.